Jonathan Lethem - The Fortress of Solitude

It was the leather jacket which caused the only piece of trouble. For once it wasn’t Dylan’s trouble. A Puerto Rican perhaps eighteen or nineteen-mustached and tall and particularly thick around the middle, pearish, apparently self-appointed one-man gang patrolling Fourteenth Street between Second and Third-isolated Gabe in his new leather from among the hundreds of other streaming Stuyvesant kids and stepped up to block his path on the sidewalk. Something affronted him and he demanded reciprocal understanding from Gabe.

“You wanna fight me?”

“ What? ” Gabe squinted in fierce incredulity.

“Think you’re tough, you wanna fight me?” He poked Gabe’s shoulder. Gabe looked to Tim and Dylan, who both stepped back.

Gabe enunciated with Maxwell Smart precision. “I actually don’t think I’m tough, no.”

“You in a crew ?”

This was a problem of codes, the self-loathing ironies of punkism not sufficiently conveyed yet to the Puerto Rican-gang quadrant of the universe. The guy himself wore just a jean jacket, wasn’t particularly fitted out or flamboyant. A red handkerchief knotted on his belt loop was maybe significant. Again Gabe’s glance sought Tim or Dylan but they’d melted away. Throngs parted around Gabe and his confronter, uninterested.

When Gabe spoke again sarcasm curdled to a whine. “I’m just wearing it, it doesn’t mean anything.” Dylan detected scars in Gabe’s cringe-readiness, schoolyard mortifications they’d never have discussed. His tone wasn’t so far from Arthur Lomb pleading I can’t breathe .

“Don’t come around here wearin’ that, man, or I have to take it off you.”

The fact of their being lost in a crowd was no help, only added a lunatic degree of humiliation. So despite Tim’s mockery, Gabe diligently obeyed the Puerto Rican. He required Tim and Dylan to accompany him the long way around that block every day for weeks. Even taking that precaution he was spooked, now hustled through subway stations and down certain blocks peeking over his shoulder, wore his jacket with doomy fear-not a bad accouterment, actually, to his punk aura.

Incredibly, the one day they defied the edict, again in what should have been a protective swarm, the guy’s radar guided him from nowhere to square against Gabe. He chest-bumped him out of Tim and Dylan’s company and to the curb.

“I tole you. Now we gotta fight.”

Gabe’s face was hot red and he spoke quietly under a strain of absurdity. “I’m not fighting you.”

It wasn’t Dylan or Aeroman who rescued Gabe, but Tim, in a delicate maneuver Dylan barely understood. Stepping out to where Gabe and the guy stood in the street he reached into the vest pocket of his own jean jacket and showed his Marlboros.

“Smoke?” He inserted a cigarette in his own mouth and held out the pack. As the Puerto Rican stared, weighing the offering, Tim said:

“Give him a break, man. He doesn’t mean anything, he can’t help it.”

Seemingly the Puerto Rican had only needed Gabe’s deep objectionability confirmed by an outside source. He accepted a cigarette. “Tell him not to come around here,” he said, ignoring Gabe, all violence leached from his tone.

“Sure, sure.”

For the first time Dylan and perhaps Gabe really noticed how Tim was taller, cooler, maybe really cool , in fact. He’d quit wearing the dog collar. His hair took the choppy haircut well, unlike Gabe’s curls. He triumphed each time those two wrestled, when you thought of it-only Gabe ever had to cry out Sprite or clitoris . But anyway, they hadn’t wrestled for months. Tim now cut all classes, was flunking madly, while Gabe like Dylan clung to respectability. One day in the park Tim appeared wearing sloppy eyeliner, and a James Dean slouch that dared you to mention the eyeliner. You didn’t. Tim smoked pot with the hippies at eight in the morning before class, while Gabe stood angrily aside in his useless jacket, the jacket he couldn’t defend without Tim’s help.

Maybe Gabe and Tim didn’t even like each other, you realized now. They barely spoke and never joked, didn’t necessarily arrive or leave school together, rode separate trams. In algebra Mr. Kaplon gestured at Tim’s empty seat and said, “Mr. Stern-any notion as to the whereabouts of our friend Mr. Vandertooth?” and Gabe said “Why ask me?”-summing it up pretty well. By Christmas vacation Gabe and Dylan played demonstration Pong at Crazy Eddie’s in rageful silence and you’d never even picture Tim Vandertooth being there. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

Mingus Rude, Arthur Lomb, Gabriel Stern and Tim Vandertooth, even Aaron X. Doily: Dylan never met anyone who wasn’t about to change immediately into someone else. His was a special talent for encountering persons about to shed one identity or disguise for another. He took it in stride by now. Maybe Rachel-Running-Crab had taught him that art.

4/3/79

viewed from space radioactive

nostrils want a kleenex

if sneezy they might blow

brooklyn to merrie england

however bad molten core might itch

don’t pick down there too deep

or you’ll toast your shell

infrared like mine

meltdown crab

Two sons might think two fathers never budged from their hiding places apart from runs to Ramirez’s or Buggy’s for bare necessities-toilet paper, Tropicana, cold cuts at gouging prices, whatever.

Two sons might think fathers utterly unschooled in the craft of stoop-sitting-might suppose them ignorant equally of their neighbors and of the delirious nature of sunshine spilled into the chasm of brownstones.

Two sons might be wrong all over. Abraham Ebdus and Barrett Rude Junior had their own Dean Street, the eleven A. M. weekday edition.

Abraham Ebdus was up for hours by then, having packed off to school a mute and bleary Dylan, half-eaten toast in his fist, then ferried a thermos of coffee upstairs for a session painting celluloid frames under natural light. Abraham made film early mornings and late nights, his best hours, reserving lunch-dulled afternoons for painting outer spacescapes and electrical gremlins from the fourth dimension, whatever the latest art director required. Book jackets took care of themselves; he could be half asleep. Drowsiness dulled rage and good taste, unnecessary functions. The film required his sleep-purified, caffeine-honed eyes and mind. From eight-thirty he might accomplish five or six seconds of footage and by eleven be ready to unkink his limbs, rinse the thermos, wander briefly from the house. Dean Street at that hour was pensive, transitive, those with jobs and school all scurried away, idlers just rousing. The first of Ramirez’s corner-men would have found a milk carton, or not. Half a block away a landlord might be brooming his portion of slate. And Barrett Rude Junior would have woken, tucked feet in slippers, moved to his stoop for a gander at the day, a first gulp of air and light.

Junior, on waking, often staggered first to the stereo whose red lights still glowed, to re-drop needle on whichever long-player had lullabyed him the night before, so when in robe or pajamas he took possession of his stoop it was with strains of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man or Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration Information at his back. If the volume was sufficient and the Dean Street bus nowhere near, Abraham Ebdus, five doors away, could hear the music, faintly. Junior came sound-tracked, wore a halo of music like a wafting smell, literal funk. No actual bodily odors reached Abraham at that distance, but it wasn’t much of a leap to suppose they clung to those frayed silks in concentrated form.